Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the world’s biggest community-written online encyclopedia, announced Friday that he had taken a small step toward his next big goal: a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google.

Wales told a group of computer scientists and programmers gathered at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland that Wikia, the for-profit Internet publishing company he founded after Wikipedia, had just acquired search technology that will serve as the foundation for the new search engine.

The technology, known as Grub, creates an index of the World Wide Web by borrowing the processing power donated by volunteer computers, similar to the SETI@home project that looks for extraterrestrial life. Grub was previously owned by LookSmart, an early Internet directory that has more recently operated as an online advertising company. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Once the Wikia index is built, people looking for information on the Web will be able to submit queries and receive answers from a combination of computer algorithms and community feedback.

Wales’ goal is to make Internet search more accurate by revealing the technology behind it. He said he would release Grub’s computer code under an open-source license that allows others to make improvements.

“It’s not a good thing that we are getting search results from a handful of very large players and we have no idea how they are generated,” Wales said in a interview with the Mercury News. “It’s like getting all your news from one source.”

According to Nielsen/Net- Ratings, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft accounted for roughly 92 percent of all Internet searches done in the United States in June.

Wales’ open-source approach to search is getting mixed reviews from other search experts.

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